What WON'T Happen In 2015?

Founder & CEO

Now that we’re past Thanksgiving and holiday parties are already upon us, it’s time to think about 2015. While I don’t mind making predictions – it’s fun, and I’m always trying to understand what might be coming next – I thought I would be a bit contrarian today and write about what won’t happen next year.

If I’m successful here, I will find myself contradicting a good number of industry press releases sure to come over the next few weeks, touting how 2015 will usher in so many new and monumental changes in advertising, advertising technology, creativity, consumer behavior and the fortunes of start-ups. Here is my list of some of the buzzier things that I don’t believe will happen in 2015:

All of America won’t get on the Internet. Yes, I know that it’s hard for many to believe, but 100 million Americans don’t have access to broadband. Even in New York City, one-third of residents don’t have Internet connections in their homes. So, for as much as we expect everything offline to suddenly shift online, let’s not forget that a very large number of people in this country – particularly lower-income Americans – don’t have ready access to the Internet.

All advertising won’t go native, social, mobile, video-first and be bought programmatically on a multichannel-attributed marketplace platform in a digital un-front. I like the latest buzzwords as much as anybody else, and I’m all for a bit of evangelizing, but sometimes I worry that too many people actually believe what they print in their own press releases.

Ad technology won’t suddenly be the darling of Wall Street. A number of advertising tech companies went public over the past year or so, and a number of others are likely to go public – or try to – this next year. Unfortunately, the best ad tech companies that survived and thrived after the long-ago dot-com bust, including folks like DoubleClick, 24/7 Media and aQuantive, were bought by heavyweights like Google, WPP and Microsoft, and the small crop of current public ad tech companies aren’t big or mature enough or profitable enough to cause Wall Street investors to get frothy and create a hot sector. That’s not likely to change just by adding the SAS acronym to companies.

TV wont die. One of my favorite topics. The 34 hours per week on average that Americans spend watching TV might drop by 10 or 15 minutes per week next year, but the medium is nowhere near extinction.

Neither will the upfront. Yes, I know. This past upfront was soft, and I suspect that next year’s will be too, given how soft the scatter market is now. However, having guaranteed, predictable access to massive amount of target audience in a high-impact media format is still way too important to way too many marketers for the futures market for buying TV shows to go away. We will have an upfront again next year, and the next, and the next.